Illustration by Alex Siklos
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It was -37 Celsius and snowing hard. I was lying on my back on the cement in front of a grocery store. I was eight months pregnant.
I’d fallen, I guess, slipped on some black ice, slipped out of consciousness and then back into it, and now I was staring up into a little circle of concerned faces, none of which I recognized. Strangers, all wearing toques and mittens and breathing out billowy clouds, shivering against the cold wind. Something odd: not one of them was wearing a winter coat. A man in a black Rush t-shirt saw me open my eyes first. “Oh, good,” he said. “Are you okay?”
That’s when I realized that the reason no one was wearing their winter coats was because I was wearing their winter coats. There was one under my feet, and the rest were stacked on top of me. My face and back were numb from being pressed into the ice, but when I tried to move, a curly-haired lady in a red sweatshirt came into view. She told everyone to move back, to give me space, and she reached down to hold me still.
“Don’t move your head, sweetie, okay? You need to be still. The ambulance is on its way.”
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It occurred to me that I should feel mortified, that all of these people were seeing me in such a vulnerable position, that they were all standing outside in frostbite weather, some of them with bare arms, for me. I said thank you and asked if someone could get my phone out of my purse so I could call my husband. I stuck a little dinosaur arm up out of the jacket pile and someone whose face I couldn’t see placed my phone into my hand. My husband answered on the third ring.
“Hey,” he said, “what’s up?”
I couldn’t see a good way to get into it. “Hey,” I said, “so, I fell? On some ice?”
“What? Where are you?”
“Um, on the ground?”
“But where?” He sounded panicky, and I tried to think of a way to say that I was waiting for an ambulance without making it sound like a big deal.
The lady in the sweatshirt started bossing people around just then. “Sir, can you hold her head for me? She needs to not move until the paramedics get here.”
I hoped my husband hadn’t heard that. “I’m at the grocery store on Broadway. They’ve called an ambulance, but I’m okay.”
He said he’d be right there. We hung up and I thanked whoever was holding my head and said I could probably get up now and that my husband was coming, but they dutifully held me down like they’d been told to do. Voices floated from out of my periphery. “How far along are you, honey?” “Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?” “Do you have any names picked out?” I answered the questions, speaking upwards into the sky. My face and hair were soaked with snow. People told me I was going to be just fine, and so was my baby, and I decided to believe them.
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I started having contractions, but I didn’t say this out loud. Someone was holding my hand. I felt safe and calm beneath my little mound of winter coats. I heard the siren of an ambulance, and then the sound of vehicle doors opening and closing, and new voices, and the lady who had been in charge was talking to the paramedics. Proudly, she informed them that they’d kept my head perfectly stationary.
Then the strangers were collecting their coats from on top of me, like I was a bed at a Christmas party. I heard them leave, wishing me luck. All I could do was say a quiet thank you.
Soon, I was in the Labour & Delivery Unit at the hospital, hooked up to a monitor, having frequent contractions, and a nurse was saying terrifying things like, “Well, this might be it!”
“This can’t be it,” I told her. “It’s not time yet.”
She laughed at me and said another terrifying thing. “You don’t decide when it’s time,” she said. “The baby decides.”
In the end, the baby blessedly decided to wait another month.
He turned 12 recently, but all these years later I still sometimes catch myself peeking at a stranger out of the corner of my eye at that grocery store, wondering if they were one of the people who had lent me a coat, rummaged through my purse for my phone, made small talk with me until the ambulance came. I only saw a few faces, and they’re a blur in my memory now. But there’s something kind of beautiful about owing a debt of kindness to a crowd of strangers, something that makes me feel more aware of everyone around me, more connected to them, more hopeful, safer, and more human.
Suzy Krause lives in Regina, Sask.